Topic > tracking

In the San Fernando Valley, drones have been determining devices’ locations from Wi-Fi and cellular signals. The company behind it says it’s the first time an adtech company has employed drones to collect wireless data.

Adblock Plus, the adblocking service that blocks pop-ups, pop-unders, blinking, and other annoying ads, and recently suggested to Twitter that it apply for whitelisting, revealed today that it only accepts 9.5 percent of advertisers to its whitelisting program.

India is rolling out a surveillance program that will give government agencies the ability to tap directly into emails and phone calls without oversight by courts or parliament. The government said this widespread monitoring is in an effort to safeguard national security.

Retailers typically measure online ads with online results: cost per click, cost per action, cost per sale. But Helsinki-based shopping analytics firm RapidBlue recently tested the effects of online ads on offline sales. And, surprisingly, it found a strong correlation: double-digit increases in both the number of shoppers and the amount of time they spent in store when stores ran Google AdWords campaigns.

Apple has sent developers flurrying to find tracking alternatives since it began rejecting some apps that take advantage of your device’s UDID, or unique device identifier, to track your behavior. But now it seems Apple is gearing up to offer a solution of its own.

The Do Not Track legislation introduced by Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) has picked up considerable steam since its debut in Congress last February and has inspired a furor of similar bills ready to clog (or already clogging) Congress. Speier and privacy groups supporting the bill say that tracking consumers’ online behavior is an invasion of privacy. Speier’s proposal would give the FTC power to create a Do Not Track database so consumers could opt out of online tracking.

The world now has access to a list of words and phrases that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security uses to monitor social networks and news article comments for terrorism and general threats against the country.

Welcome to another edition of yellow journalism with Julia Angwin of The Wall Street Journal. The reporter who brought you the “What They Know” series has caught Google with its pants down. The WSJ found that Google managed to get temporary tracking cookies assigned to people using Safari on the iPhone and iPad, even though both Apple and Google told consumers that Safari, by default, blocked this kind of activity.